Shirin Akiner - Tajikistan: The Trials of Independence

TAJIKISTAN:
THE TRIALS OF
INDEPENDENCE

Edited by

Mohammad-Reza Djalili, Frdric Grare and Shirin Akiner

Central Asia Research Forum

First published in French as Le Tadjikistan l'preuve de l'indpendance

by the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva, 1995

First Published in English 1998

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

Transferred to Digital Printing 2008

1998 Mohammad-Reza Djalili, Frdric Grare and
Shirin Akiner

Typeset in Sabon by LaserScript Ltd, Mitcham

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-7007-0420-5

Publisher's Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

Thanks to the astonishing ease with which they undertake to change the world, the Russians, once established in Central Asia, that bastion of Sunni Islam, managed to create a secular society in a matter of decades. They made town-dwellers of the chiefly rural and nomadic Turks; the metropolitan and bookish Tajiks they turned into peasants and mountain herders.

Charif and Roustam Choukourov, Peuples d'Asie centrale,

Syros, Paris, 1994

The editors of this book would like to thank the Graduate Institute of International Studies, the Modern Asia Research Centre, the Institute of Development Studies and the Aga Khan Foundation, whose financial support has made this book possible. They would like to express their profound gratitude to Mrs Marie jo Due, whose work enabled this book to appear, and to Miss Lene Madsen, who did the translations for the first edition. The second edition was translated from French and Russian by Cybele Hay.

M.-R. Ojalili is particularly grateful to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Cologne, whose support enabled him to carry out a series of studies in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

The approximate and conventional nature of transliteration always makes it a difficult exercise. Central Asia's diversity of languages and frequent alphabet changes give rise to further complications. For the first edition, the editors adopted a policy of non-intervention, leaving the authors free to use whichever method they chose. For the second edition, standard spellings have been used for the principal geographical and personal names. Other transliterations have been changed to make them conform with English, rather than French, spelling conventions, but otherwise left unaltered.

Wedged in between Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, China and Afghanistan, Tajikistan is, at 143,000 km2, the smallest of the ex-Soviet Central Asian republics and, with some 5.5 million inhabitants, the third most populous. Its peripheral position and mountainous terrain have also made it the least developed country in the CIS, with the lowest rate of urbanisation and the highest demographic growth. Since it achieved independence in September 1991, Tajikistan has been going through a very painful period of transition, punctuated by a series of political crises, which have resulted in the division of its people into rival and antagonistic clans; foreign intervention, chiefly by Russians and Uzbeks; and a civil war spilling over its borders into Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, where thousands of Tajiks have fled for refuge.

This work, which brings together thirteen essays about Tajikistan, takes as its central theme the conflict which erupted in the Republic in 1992.1 This focus has been chosen not only because the conflict is an important event in the history of this young nation, but also because it highlights the complexities of Tajikistan's situation. The war reveals the deep contradictions eroding Tajik society and at the same time foreshadows events that an independent Tajikistan may undergo in the future. Rooted in the social and historical conditions of Tajikistan, the conflict above all raises questions about the country's identity and its organisation as a separate state.

The Tajiks are the Persian-speakers of former-Soviet Central Asia, and the issue of language lies at the heart of the foundation of the Tajik state. The Republic of Tajikistan, an enclave of Iranian language in a Turcophone area, is defined essentially by this linguistic characteristic, the more so since Stalin's doctrine of nationality, which lay behind the Soviet nation-building project, takes language and territory as the chief defining factors. The language question guided the creation of Tajikistan, fuelled the political debate at times of upheaval, created tensions in the relationship with Uzbekistan, where significant Tajik communities live, and prompted overtures towards the Persian-speaking world outside the former Soviet Union. But the pre-eminence of the Persian language in the Republic does not by itself explain the identity of Tajikistan. The first part of this work, 'Construction of a National Identity', addresses the question of what constitutes Tajik identity. Pierre Centlivres and Micheline Centlivres-Demont examine the ethnic composition of the region and the dynamics which govern relations between ethnic groups. Guissou Jahangiri attempts to trace the political processes through which Tajik identity was formed in the early years of the Soviet period, and evaluates the extent to which its construction has been completed.